Ridley

Fenix SL 30 Complete Road Bike - 2016

In your search for a bike that can handle any road race or epic, multi-surface ride adventure, look no further than the race-proven durability and snappy style of Ridley's Fenix SL 30 Complete Road Bike. Built to shepherd the pros through the historic cobbles and flashy finishes of Europe's storied Northern classics, the Fenix SL offers riders a rarely seen combination of sprint-worthy stiffness, long-mile comfort, and mountain-goat climbing ability.

The frame is made from light, stiff high-modulus carbon fiber with slightly more road-smoothing compliance than the less-forgiving Noah SL. The Fenix SL's seatstays also feature a narrow, flat section profile to absorb energy-sucking road vibrations. Despite their focus on comfort, the seatstays still maintain lateral stiffness to reduce side-to-side flex and ensure every bit of power gets transferred to forward motion. A flat, curved top tube serves as a leaf spring of sorts, working harmoniously with the seatstays for extra road-smoothing vibration management that — again — avoids impacting lateral stiffness for a comfy, fast ride over even the roughest road surfaces.

Ridley claims that the peculiar, multi-hexagonal shaping of the top and down tubes increases the frame's torsional rigidity and improves impact protection. That means the frame is designed to tolerate Roubaix-level abuse and Greipel-level power and still keep on rolling. On the front end, a tapered head tube helps to increase stiffness under load, resulting in exceptional handling and cornering capabilities. The Fenix SL will jump when you tell it to and corner on rails to steal the inside line or confidently manage sweeping descents.

A PressFit BB86 bottom bracket shell sits in the middle of the frame, offering an extra helping of stiffness to reduce the number of watts lost to a flexing bottom bracket during hard efforts. As an added bonus, an integrated fork crown makes for a smooth transition between the head tube and fork. Ridley does make explicit note of this design's aerodynamic properties, but the claim is buried in the frame's technical documents.

To complete the build, Ridley outfits the Fenix SL 30 with a curated blend of Shimano components. The highlights are the Ultegra shifting components, which run nearly toe-to-toe with Shimano's top level Dura-Ace group, carrying just a tiny bit of extra weight and a much lower price tag. The semi-compact 52/36t chainring combination provides oodles of gearing versatility to ride or race on everything from flat chip seal to the cobblestoned hellingen of Flanders. A 4ZA Stratos cockpit keeps you firmly in control, and a set of Fulcrum Racing 7 wheels gets you rolling smoothly down the road on Campagnolo-designed hubs. In the event the road gets rough and you want some extra cushion, the Fenix SL clears 28mm tires with ease.